If you want to brag about your blog’s comment count, this is the Plugin to try. The Liz Strauss Comment Counter Plugin adds a chicklet comment counter similar to Feedburner to your blog. You can configure it with a variety of colors and styles. Ozh has included a lot of great features to customize the look to match your blog’s color scheme and styles. This is a great way to show off the number of comments on your blog.

Think about it. Instead of the arbitrary judgment of how many feed subscribers or visitors you have on your blog, you could give valuable feedback to your blog visitors on how social your blog really is. Every time someone leaves a comment, the count increases. Think of the possibilities!

You could have contests that help drive up the comment count. You could ask people to bet on when your comment count will break a significant score like 10,000, 100,000, or maybe even 100. Blogs could compete against each other to raise their comment count. Or it could just sit there and let the world know that you welcome comments. The more the merrier.

The Comment Count Plugin is getting rave reviews and can be seen in action at Hot for Words and Momworx. The Plugin has been translated into Italian, too.

Ozh of PlanetOzh is one of the top award-winning WordPress Plugin experts in the WordPress Community – probably the world. His Plugins have been top winners in the Weblog Tools Collection WordPress Plugin Competition and are frequently featured in the most popular and top download lists on the various WordPress Plugin directories, listings, and repositories. He has done amazing work with WordPress Themes, WordPress Plugins, WordPress tools and utilities, web design, coding, and more non-WordPress projects. A few of his most popular Plugins include:

One of the ways a WordPress Plugin or Widget makes it into WordPress.com is by being among the top downloaded and most popular Plugins on the WordPress Plugin Directory. If you have the full version of WordPress, have your say on how you like it, and encourage others to download and install it.

I really think that the blog comment war is going to heat up with this new hot Plugin.

Wow! Thanks for featuring my website! I’ve been using YOUR website as a major source of reference while I built my WordPress site!

Keep up the great work, I owe a LOT to you!

It is hard to believe that I have 52,000 comments! :-) One of the reasons I do is because of a wonderful plugin called WordPress Thread Comment where the plugin emails a commenter if HIS/HER comment is SPECIFICALLY replied to…. that keeps commenters coming back multiple times a day to participate in conversations mostly among themselves.

A blanket (subscribe to comments) would not work on my site as my posts get 300 comments at times.. people would be inundated with emails all day long… and would QUICKLY turn off email notifications. This plugin ONLY alerts them if THEIR specific comment has been replied to.

I added in the plugin WP Paged Comments by the same guy and turned off the paging function but turned on reverse order for comments where the most recent comments appear at the top.

This has created the perfect environment to spur LOTS of comments and stickiness :-)

Perhaps you can review the plugin at some point and feel free to contact me for any specifics you may want to know.

I hate to comment here at all, not wanting to increase your counter, but just one comment could be worth saying:

Yeah, comment competitions are just what the blogosphere needs to stay fresh. Way to encourage a rat race in statistics.

No discredit to Ozh or comments in general, but I don’t want to see such total comment-orientated nonsense on any of the blogs I read. It’s stupid and immature. I’m all for more comments, but a competition for higher numbers of comments is meaningless and can at best distract from the actually interesting content a blog might have.

I’m so glad you were one of the first to adopt this Plugin. Isn’t it an amazing experience when you actually find out how many comments you have on your blog? We micro-focus so much on how many comments a single post gets – or doesn’t get – without looking at the overall total. It changes perspectives indeed.

The WordPress Thread Comment is a great alternative to the Subscribe to Comments, especially with a high-comment traffic blog. Great recommendation. I’ve recommended it in the past, but I should mention it again soon. Thanks for the reminder.

Aren’t WordPress Plugin authors the BEST of the BEST! I love them and worship the ground they float over. They make our blogging lives so much easier and fun!

@ Lorelle VanFossen, plugin authors really are the best! The author of the plugin I was talking about is Chinese I believe and speaks very little English…. but I’ve communicated with him.. given him feedback, even paid him some money for writing such a great plugin!

It’s amazing how I will want something, and if it doesn’t exist yet for WordPress.. all I usually have to do is wait a few months and then, boom!, someone’s written a plugin to do it!:-)

Wow, this plugin really does some fame right now, *happy to be using this one*
Indeed, there are a lot of blogs that don’t have that many followers via Feedburner and other services, yet get a lot of comments!

Finally, there’s some way to show off the comments I have on my blog, although they are not that many^^,)

I guess this could go either way though… I get a bunch of “this post is rad” comment spam that gets disposed of. But every once in a while there will be an exceptionally insightful comment that deserves to be a blog post of its own. Crunching it all down into a single number could give an idea of how active the visitors are, but not necessary about the quality of the said activity.

To deal with quality, many are using the “Rate This Comment” type of Plugin, allowing readers to judge the quality of the comment. Not sure how much influence that has on improving comment quality, but I believe we need to teach our readers how to comment until they figure it out for themselves. We set a good example first, and then help them along the way. Pointing to articles like How NOT to Comment on Comments help, too. :D

I must admit, when I started reading this article, I thought it was part of the ‘blog design clutter’-series (but you wrote that on another blog, I realized). Soon it became clear to me that this wasn’t an ironic description of a plugin you considered superfluous, but that it was genuine praise.

Well, I won’t use it ;-). (And I won’t look at it on another blog. I read a blog when I consider it interesting, not because thousands of other seem to think that.)

Wow! Thank you to you for this celebration and to Ozh for his incredible list of contributions. I look at the comments here and I see one more reason that we all together make a better conversation. The statements that quality can’t measured are words to keep close and always remember — we can’t measure engagement, new ideas, or thoughtful exchanges. But we can let every person who invests the time to write a response or a question that their comment counts as a respected contribution. Thank you, again.

The Plugin will not work with WordPress.com blogs, though, as I say in the article, you can request it and hopefully enough people will request it.

@Liz: I’m excited about this new Plugin as it gives a new metric to the art of blogging. It will be fascinating to see how it impacts and influences bloggers and readers much like the feedburner chicklet did. And it’s namesake deserves the recognition!

@annetanne: Interesting connection with the blog clutter series from the Blog Herald. That series is a look at all the things we stuff into our blog’s design, asking ourselves which of these are critical to our blog’s purpose and intent and which can go as they don’t serve the reader’s needs nor ours.

As with anything you add to your blog’s design, you have to really evaluate its worth. For some bloggers, the feedburner counter has been found to encourage feed subscriptions. For others, it has had no impact. For others, the number in the counter can be interpreted to be a value judgment on the blog. This Plugin is no different.

It will work for some, not for others, but actually add benefit to those to whom comments, and encouraging comments, is important. Luckily, we all have choices in our blog’s design – as long as we make them thoughtfully. :D

@nakedbones: Superficial? There are many ways to judge a blog. By it’s design, feedburner score, content, conversation, photographs, images, and more. As mentioned, a comment counter is just another piece of information a blogger can give to visitors to tell them something about their blog. If it is a conversation blog, this is a neat way of giving them a hint that comments are not only welcome, but count in the literal sense of the world. I like that.

Think of any other metrics to include? Leave a comment on my blog. Maybe I’ll commission someone to create this thing. LOL.

I agree with everyone else talking about how focusing on comment count can distract from the purpose of the blog, and really doesn’t say much about it, beyond the fact that if you have thousands of comments you clearly have many involved readers. I don’t think it is a great way to “score” a blog though.

Is the issue with WordPress.com about increasing traffic or making money? Traffic comes due to content, not gadgets and gizmos.

However, we’re talking about comments and conversation, not traffic, a different issue. A lot of bloggers get a lot of traffic and few comments. Some get little traffic and a ton of comments.

@leicalady

I agree with you. :D This is a fun Plugin and among all the fun things you can put in your WordPress sidebar, I think that this is a clever idea and a great way to get a conversation going as well as a fun way to recognize the social nature of your blog. People are being WAY too serious about this. It’s a fun and novel toy! Enjoy!

If you want this on your blog, it’s a WordPress Plugin. Download the Plugin and follow the installation instructions. If you are using the latest version of WordPress, you can find it directly from the WordPress Administration Panels > Plugins Panel.

The Plugin has nothing to do with editing or deleting comments, nor comment spam. It doesn’t count comment spam. You add a comment, the score goes up. You delete a comment, the score goes down. It simply counts comments. Nothing more that you have to worry about.

I stand corrected. Great point. I’m looking at increasing traffic for a site at this point. I benchmark off of other popular blogs in the same niche and they get a ton of comments. Then again, I noticed all the commenting on those sites seems to come from a critical mass. Hmm….you’ve got my wheels churning.

@Nakedbones: To quibble a bit, comments aren’t necessarily the sign of a great blog, just as a lot of content isn’t necessarily the sign of a great (or even good) blog.

However, a lot of comments (assuming adequate spam protection and moderation) can certainly lead one to conclude a lot of people found the content to be worthwhile. I guess I don’t understand how a small counter such as this plugin detracts from (or adds to) a blog’s worth. And I would certainly hope the presence or absence of anything in a sidebar isn’t the factor that drives one’s decision to read or subscribe to a blog.

Eh, I’m afraid I don’t know. I mean, for example, my blog doesn’t draw many comments–right now it has just three (four if you count pingbacks), and one of them is a response by me to an existing comment. Sigh–nobody loves me, I suppose.

But wait! I know exactly what to blame–Akismet! I mean, if I turned Akismet and comment moderation off, I’d have *thousands* of comments! I’d skyrocket to the top of the rankings! Well, the middle of the rankings, anyway.

Number of comments just seems a weird way to compete. I mean, I could even enter tens of thousands of comments on my own blog, if what I really wanted was big numbers (rather than, say, providing a remotely interesting or useful experience for my readers) and I had nothing better to do.

I’m not even sure combining this with a comment rating system would help. If I wanted to “get to the top of the charts,” I’d just make my own spambots that would rate my fake comments highly from a zillion different cheap-to-register or insecure IPs. I mean, I wouldn’t, but you know.

Yeah, it’s a really dumb thing to do to your blog. But if comment count is made into some sort of be-and-end-all of the quality of a blog, it will become meaningless almost immediately, because some people *will* do things that dumb to get the numbers (spend a little time on any MMORPG, if you don’t believe me). Just so long as people know that.

@nakedbones: Superficial? There are many ways to judge a blog. By it’s design, feedburner score, content, conversation, photographs, images, and more. As mentioned, a comment counter is just another piece of information a blogger can give to visitors to tell them something about their blog. If it is a conversation blog, this is a neat way of giving them a hint that comments are not only welcome, but count in the literal sense of the world. I like that.

Unfortunately, it should but often isn’t. We continue to be a society that judges a book by it’s cover. And I wasn’t listing specifics in their order of importance. I always put content first. It’s the rest of the world that visits blogs that have to considered. :D

This is a fun Plugin that helps to generate conversation, obviously. I hope everyone is having fun talking about the art of the blog conversation and featuring this Plugin on their WordPress blogs to help get the talk started. Why not?

Interesting. Look at how much energy you put into that comment – so comments must mean something. Sure, people will do dumb things for attention, but this is a fun Plugin people can use that has only the value to it that others will impose upon it. It’s just a number. What you do with it is up to you.

Some will work harder to make the number go up, some will just put it on because it’s fun. Others will play with it, but others will be proud of their numbers because they are proud of their readers and their level of participation.

I think there are a lot of things people do to their blogs that are much dumber than this. But that’s what makes blogs so interesting. Dumb and intelligence can win if it satisfies the blogger and they get out of it what they want. All win.

Comments are fun. Why not count the fun? We like scores in games? The Olympics just reminded us of that. Why not have some Olympics for bloggers with awards for comments, number of posts, and other fun statistics? Why not have fun with the numbers?

We could have Liz Strauss dressed up in a bikini and crown awarding the highest comment count bloggers in the world with a trophy. Wouldn’t that be a crowd pleaser! hee hee.

I agree. As the queen of the blog conversation, I’m so thrilled to see her honored this way. We all have a lot to learn from Liz (says she who waits breathlessly for every blog post she publishes. :D )

Like the look of things you have here on your blog. You have a nice use of fonts and such in your blog pages that looks good and it not typically something I use much at all. I really the signature pic at the end of your blogs, makes it almost feel like you wrote it by hand – I am going to have to check into doing something like that.

I am not convinced about this comment thing being a measure. Maybe it is in some ways, but as soon as you start holding contests to push up the count doesn’t that really start to skew any true measurement that you would be getting on that? I am just questioning so do not get mad or anything. I am definitely going to have to check out some of your other tips.

Oh, sure, so long as it’s understood that it’s all in fun. What I was worried about was this statement, from your original post: “With the push towards a successful blog being defined by its comments, a new WordPress Plugin has appeared that may push the comment frenzy even more..”

That doesn’t sound like a game to me. That sounds very serious.

Yes, I put some effort into that comment–which shows that *some* comments count for something. Some only kind of count, like comments that just read “Great post!” some don’t count at all, like spam (which is often hard to tell from the “Great post!” comments unless you look at who wrote them and what URL they provided).

The value of “great post”-type comments may, of course, vary from blog type to blog type. In a social blog, where the idea might be largely to shoot the breeze, one-liners might be perfectly fine. I don’t have a personal blog, just a professional one; there, of course, what counts as a valuable comment has fairly different standards. On the other hand, spam isn’t useful to anybody, unless their blog is actually a social experiment about spam.

Oh, just for clarity–I didn’t mean that using this plugin was a dumb thing to do to your blog. As long as you don’t take it too seriously, I think it’s fine. When I said “it’s a dumb thing to do to your blog,” I was referring to spamming yourself for the purposes of increasing your comment count, a practice that will almost assuredly *decrease* your blog’s actual value (but will make you look good in the “who has more comments” game).

Fun one! I love when wild stats can be used just for the fun of it! But I have a sense that the 137,200 comments that tjuvlyssnat.se has isn’t very cool outside of Sweden. Is there a comment millionaire somewhere out there?

Maybe I should reparaphrase my concerns: A high comment count *is* *one* indication of a good blog, I think (neither necessary nor sufficient, but suggestive). But that’s sort of a self-denying prophecy (the opposite of a self-fulfilling one). If everybody agrees with it, and believes it strongly enough, it will cease to be true, because more people will let their moderation slip (or worse, deliberately keep spam comments or even make them themselves using another online identity) so that people will think their blog is good.

The definition for many for “blog” is focused on the interactivity, specifically the comments. Why not display your comment count? It doesn’t have to be about a score card or contest. It is about telling the world you are open for comments and interaction.

Thanks for your kind words about my blog. The signature is described in Adding a Signature To Personalize Your Blog Post if you would like to know how. It is actually a combination of handwritten fonts. No one can read my real signature. :D

Everything we do in our blog’s designs and every design element we add, including feed icons and comment counts, is about encouraging people to return and participate – and tell their friends. The more friendly and user-friendly a site is, the more likely that is to happen.

You have a lot of gadgets and stuff in your blog which may or may not play nice with the Plugin. You also may not have followed the instructions right. Please contact the Plugin author for Plugin support as they will have the best information on how to help you.

I see that you manually add/remove cells, and sets its row spans in the click handlers.

that is not a good way to use gwt, as you did not abstract yourself from html, but is just writing “html” in java.

what you could do is instead define two more widgets – one widget for the collapsed state view, and another for the open state view. how you implement these widgets is up to you, but i would just have another table in there.

then, in each cell of the flex-table you would add in the correct widget when the click happens.

that way, you dont get bogged down in the click handler with table manipulation code.

Just a note to say that though I’m sure Ozh has some great plugins (I’ve never used any on that list and my list of plugins is a long one), I found Gamerz WP-Stats most useful, it’s been around for years, and one of the first items on the stats page is both post and comment count. I never give much weight to comment count, though, I give weight to comment content and back end conversation. That’s what makes a dedicated reader – and some would rather have a dedicated reader than someone who just fly’s by and tosses in 2 cents along the way.

Just a personal blog perspective – I’m no pro blogger and don’t aim to be. :)

I’m a huge fan of Lester Chan’s Plugins. As for the benefit of using the Comment Counter Chicklet, it adds an almost subliminal impact on the visitor when they see it, which can’t be bad if you want your site to be a social one.

What I found really interesting about the counter is that Ozh added the stats to tell you the ratio of comments to blog posts. That’s information I hadn’t found elsewhere that may prove to be useful.

It’s for fun anyway. Have fun with it and see what your readers say and what you learn from the experience.

[…] with a nice picture of a bridge. The design is rather blog like. I almost expect to see a comment count next to the items in the right sidebar which happen to be links to other Alliance Trust web […]

[…] to a person. I’ve written extensively about it, including the initial announcement in “My Comment Count is Bigger Than Your Comment Count!.” The Plugin puts a chicklet on your sidebar that tracks the number of comments on your blog. […]